Cisco's Unified Computing System is garnering interest, but storage appears to be the focus of CIOs as they ponder the next generation data center and that's good news for EMC and NetApp, according to a Goldman Sachs survey.

Cisco's Unified Computing System is garnering interest, but storage appears to be the focus of CIOs as they ponder the next generation data center and that's good news for EMC and NetApp, according to a Goldman Sachs survey.

Goldman Sachs surveyed 100 IT executives at Fortune 1000 companies to get a read on their data center plans two to three years from now.

Among the takeaways:

Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) has found "a surprisingly receptive ear," according to Goldman Sachs. Indeed, 18 percent are planning to evaluate Cisco's UCS in the next 12 months, an impressive figure for a product that was announced a few weeks ago. Another two-thirds of IT execs say that they expect Cisco have a larger server presence over the next 2 to 3 years.

Among those surveyed, 18 percent said they will evaluate UCS in the next 12 months, 44 percent said no and 38 percent were unsure.

Cisco, HP and Dell were vendors expected to increase data center share, according to respondents. Sun and IBM are seen decreasing.

These charts tell the tale:

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And.

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The next gen data center push is benefiting pure storage players. EMC and NetApp are seen gaining share in the next-gen data center. A key point: As tech giants try to further integrate hardware and software independent storage vendors NetApp and EMC are benefiting. Why? These vendors work with any architecture and they're ahead on storage virtualization.

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VMware is seen as the most strategic software vendor, but Microsoft has a better-than-expected finish. Meanwhile, Oracle got a mention as being strategic on the virtualization front.

The standings:

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Cisco and Juniper defend switching turf. Goldman Sachs notes:

Despite the heightened activity in data center networking, including the launch of Juniper's new high-end switching platform as well as HP's ProCurve partner ecosystem, Cisco is expected to further extend its already sizable lead in the long-term. This is consistent with our IT Survey's results pointing to share gains in the near term. Juniper also appears to be gaining traction in switching as our survey points to the company increasing its presence in the data center, with nearly 70% of the respondents citing share gains over next 2-3 years.